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women’s studies

women’s studies

Since the 1970s, an idealized stereotype has emerged, where Amish people are seen as products of a happier time when individuals lived in harmony with one another, the earth, and God, says Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State University.

"We are in the best of times and the worst of times with respect to media representation of female athletes," stated Marie Hardin last Wednesday. Hardin, associate director of the Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State, was the second speaker in this spring's Research Unplugged conversation series, held at the Penn State Downtown Theatre.

Writer Ernest Hemingway dodged bullets as a war correspondent, fought bulls in Spain, and hunted big game in Africa-but when asked to name the scariest thing he ever encountered, he answered, "A blank sheet of paper."

For many of us, the symptoms of writer's block-staring at a blank computer screen or page with no clue how to begin, stomach clenching, throat tightening,-are all too familiar. But is our suffering a real syndrome or simply an excuse for being unproductive?

"How many of you think girls are mean?" Cheryl Dellasega asked the crowd gathered in the Downtown Theatre last Wednesday for the final Research Unplugged conversation of the Fall season. A majority of audience members raised their hands. "Well, I don't think that girls are inherently cruel," responded Dellasega.

Carol Gilligan—influential feminist psychologist and author—is worried. Gilligan's 1982 book In Another Voice (called "the little book that started a revolution" by Harvard University Press) electrified the pundit class with its premise that girls were fundamentally misread and oppressed by American society. The advocacy programs promoting equality for girls that resulted from Gilligan's call-to-arms have had an impact few would deny.

"It's my party and I'll cry if I want to" sang teeny-bopper Lesley Gore in the 1963 chart-topper by the same name. But grownups take heed: Society may not be as accepting of crying in adults as they are for the younger set.

Penn State professor of psychology and women's studies, Stephanie Shields, and doctoral candidate Leah Warner conducted research on gender and perceptions of crying in adults, and their results will be included as a co-authored chapter in the forthcoming book, Group Dynamics and Emotional Expression (Cambridge University Press).

A drawl marks you, whether intentionally or not, as having a geographic past, with all the associative baggage that locale carries. This slow inflection can surface unexpectedly, even after a long absence from the place of its origin. Some may work diligently to remove this mark, only to find later that they somehow miss its enduring familiarity.

Somewhere along the way of living cloistered by strip mines (four mines within a three-mile radius of my home), I began retrieving, rescuing, rocks—some no bigger than my thumb, some weighing more than I—marveling at their astonishing variety and deeply moved by their singularity. I consider these rocks to be both beings and land. They are refuse and composite refusal of the hill or land, of its once (mythically) whole, "unreconstitutable" presence.

Two Greek classical figures, overlapped in space and time, recall Heraclitus's notion of a new dimension, a "threefold of time"—past, present, and future as well as a line from the work of Jorge Luis Borges: "what web is this, of will be, is, and was."

A female professor I know often laments, I wish I had a wife. You know, someone to have dinner waiting when she got home, to deal with dripping faucets and leaky roofs, to buy the groceries and sort the laundry and vacuum the house, to pick the kids up from school, feed them their snacks, and bundle them off to soccer practice or music lessons, to make sure they do their homework. It's a luxury not many young academics, female or male, can afford, the stay-at-home spouse. (My friend's husband is also a professor.)

A woman goes to the doctor. She is in pain. Chances are, since the pain sits in her abdomen, just above the bikini line, she has gone to her gynecologist. The doctor examines her. That doubles her pain. She is not pregnant. The tests are all negative. When is the pain worst? the doctor asks. The woman replies: During sex. The doctor nods. He looks concerned. Your husband is perhaps a little rough? The woman looks surprised. No, not at all. The doctor nods. There is nothing wrong with you, dear, he says.